Turkey Day with a Guitar Deity

For all the obvious and correct reasons, Thanksgiving should be about grease-spattered gluttony and the picked-clean carcasses of large, roasted birds, and also getting ludicrously drunk.

Just kidding.

Thanksgiving — properly observed — is about family and friends and the titular appreciation for All the Good Things we are blessed with. (If you wanna throw some beer and turkey in there, why, that’s okay, too.)

I have myriad wonderful memories of the holiday, but in the context of this blog, I’d like to share a recollection of Thanksgiving, 1976, and a very cool experience with the Irish blues-rock guitarist Rory Gallagher.

I’ve written many times about Gallagher — one of the greatest guitarists ever and, if you don’t know of him or his catalog, you can’t really present yourself as someone who knows and appreciates music. That’s just the truth.

Anyhoo, here’s a link to an article about my T-giving with Rory. It was originally published in the Dallas Observer.

As clueless as it still seems all these years later, I enrolled at Baylor University without giving much thought to the fact that it’s a Baptist college and, as such, there would be a lot of attention paid to, well,...